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August 11th, 2009 | Posted in Technical Writing 17 Comments »
A lot of departments think that a team needs a style guide and a unified approach, if you want the audience to experience a consistent, professional branded experience. I used to think the same. In fact, just last week, we started discussing whether to use greater than symbols (>) or pipes (|) or nothing at all to indicate menu hierarchy and subtabs. I admit that a team needs to be on the same general page. And in a lot of situations, providing writers with a style guide helps them with a basic grounding that they need to be productive.
And yet, it’s been nearly two years now at my job, and we still don’t have an official team style guide beyond the Microsoft Manual of Style or Chicago. Somehow, not having a style guide has not been a detriment. Not having a style guide gives us certain liberties — liberties to adapt to the situation and use our best judgment, to experiment with new approaches and techniques, and to choose the language and style that best fits the specific project, situation, and audience. Best of all, we never feel cramped by what inevitably seem to be limiting policies and strictures.
This insight into a more open style also has some applications into parenting. This summer, we’ve had two friends and their children stay with us. There’s nothing like a guest with children at your house to see how different your own parenting style is. Discrepancies abound in almost everything, from when you put the kids down, to the routine you use at night, the number of baths you give your kids a week, their TV watching permissions, disciplinary techniques such as time out, what you force your kids to eat at the table, whether you spank your children, whether you use diversion instead of directness, whether you play with your children, whether they must clean up after dinner, whether you send your kids to public school, private school, or home school, and so on.
Although almost none of us has had training as a parent, we’re all pretty set in the correctness of our parenting methods. However we’ve come to embrace our style, we carry it out with rigidity and an unwavering sense of right.
It’s easy to look at other parenting styles and be critical, to point out flaws, or gossip about how backwards or crazy some decisions are. Instead, though, after our summer of guests, I’ve learned that each parent adopts the style he or she prefers and is almost destined to embrace, just as each writer adopts the style he or she prefers and is destined to embrace.
Sure, you could force writers to conform to a specific set of style standards with rigid requirements (e.g., never use pipes, always hyphenate e-mail, avoid the word “may” or “will,” never have more than 10 steps in a list, always format subheadings in 14px bold #333), but the effect may be just as stifling as requiring parents to conform to a specific style of parenting not their own (e.g., put your kids down at 7p.m., make them eat vegetables before dessert, avoid prolonged exposure outdoors, lock their bedroom doors at night, never tolerate impolite behavior, always braid their hair on Sundays).
Rather than criticize parenting styles different from my own, or writer’s styles different from my own, I am embracing a more open, relative philosophy (to some extent). In many cases, people adopt the style that matches their strengths, that fits in with a thousand impressions and influences that have shaped their perceptions, and which they feel most comfortable with. If you force people to go against their natural style, the result is often disastrous. We are most natural and productive using the style that fits us.
And yet, I’m not advocating extremism here. Two parents living in the same household have to be on the same general page in order to function as a team. One parent can’t adopt a disciplinary technique of spanking while the other parent doesn’t discipline at all. Just as one writer can’t start writing documentation in haikus while the other writes in novelesque form.
But the idea that a team has to be so uniform in their consistency down to an extremely granular level, such that they limit themselves from any experimentation, personal style, or best-judgment-for-the-situation decisions, is not a productive mindset. Customers don’t really care, and in the end, the breathing room writers feel will have tremendous payoff in their dedication and contributions to the team.
Interesting parallels, Tom. I think a team of writers functions best when they are given minimal guidelines and then left to fulfill assignments with their own style and strengths — kind of like a family.
Besides, all this haggling about presentation and formatting is why CSS was invented, no?
Matt, thanks for your comment. I agree that CSS does lend itself to interesting possibilities for variations within a team style. Good point. I hadn’t thought of it from that angle.
Guidelines are just that: a guide. They’re not written in stone. They’re not sacrosanct. I’ve worked at places where any deviation from the style guide, no matter how minor, caused a technical editor or a manager to blow their top.
While consistency (and that’s the purpose of a style guide) is good, the most important factor is the quality of the documentation. If a reader isn’t going to notice that a deviation from the style guide, then best not to worry about it. Make sure your content is as bullet resistant as it can be.
Always keep in mind that the people you’re working with are professionals. They know what they’re doing (at least I hope they do). They can adapt. They can learn. Trust in that, and the consistency that a style guide is supposed to reinforce will come.
Scott, you expressed my point probably better than I did. I’m really writing against these people that blow their top when they see one writer using “drop-down” and another using “dropdown.” In my experience, no user has ever written in to complain about trifles such as these.
So you won’t care if I start writing with two spaces after every period?
Honey, if you start writing 2 spaces after periods, I will start slurping freely at the table.
I understand the need to foster creativity among writers, and I agree completely that setting rigid standards to the point of micromanagement does nobody any good, but I fail to see how having a common standard for certain style conventions falls into this category.
What I’ve seen, particularly in the IT industry over the past 10 years, is the attitude that having *any* kind of standard or process is a bad thing, and that we should all be “innovative” and “think outside the box” to the point where it seems like anything goes.
The result, from my perspective, has been a deterioration of all standards – from dress codes to meeting decorum, to even following basic rules of spelling and grammar when writing an email. Yes, I know, we’re all “very busy” but how much time does it take to skim over an email before you hit the Send button to make sure it doesn’t look like a text message sent by a sixth grader? I know it’s a minor thing to some, but I sort of expect a VP to know how to spell “through.”
When you have no standards, then nobody is right, nobody is accountable, and everything becomes an argument won by the person who can speak the loudest and longest.
I’m not advocating rigid standards without exception that lead to a bloated bureaucracy – people mindlessly following the rules because “the book says so” whether it makes sense or not, but when you have a team whose members are all going off and doing their own thing, is it really a team?
Our Technical Communications team has a style guide. We produce customer-facing documents that reflect the quality of our work as individuals, the Tech Comm Team, and our company. All of our manuals have the same look and feel, and are consistent in their format, style, and conventions. Our manuals have won several awards at STC competitions and have received accolades from our customers.
Our style guide was a joint effort – each member of the team had input and when we disagreed on a point (e.g., whether or not to hyphenate e-mail) we voted on it.
We all follow our style guide, and neither I nor any of our other writers (that I know of) feel that our creativity or ability to tailor the manual to the user has been stifled by having a style guide. If anything, it has helped.
My feeling is that if more people actually followed the many standards and processes that are in place in their companies, there would be no need to be constantly re-inventing the wheel every six months (RUP, Six Sigma, CMMI, SCRUM, etc.).
Joe
Joe, thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful comment. And sorry for my slow reply to this thread. I mostly agree with you here — I’m not advocating that all style guides and standards be thrown out the window in favor of creativity, innovation, and freedom. I’m saying that enforcing a rigid style guide isn’t a necessary thing to do. We generally follow Microsoft and Chicago, as well as standard grammar. And we do generally hyphenate e-mail as well because another style guide in our org dictates it, but I think that exacting conformity to a granular-level style guide produces boxed in thinking, and eventually people do stop thinking for themselves. I would gladly accept variation in how people write “email” if it led to greater innovation and more responsible practices among a team.
I suspect that even in the absence of a formal guidelines, there is team folklore that acts as an unwritten version of the style guide.
In any event, in my experience, a team style guide has these benefits (at least, and probably others I’m not thinking of):
It saves editing time. I edit 8 writers; I don’t have time to get into discussions with each of them in every situation about what the preferred term might be, or the best way to phrase link text or a statement about security, or how we want to construct tutorials, or another of a thousand things we’ve worked out. I don’t object to discussing exceptional cases, but most cases aren’t exceptional. In the absence of a style guide, OTOH, every case is unique.
If your content will be translated, having consistent verbiage makes it easier for the localizers. If you use “annotated” in one sentence and “marked” in the next, the translator has good cause to wonder whether these are intended to be different terms, even if you meant them the same. Similarly, if one writer uses “tags” and one uses “elements,” are they really talking about the same thing?
If you have back-end tools that are used to publish documentation, a style guide provides a place to lay out the rules that those tools live by (e.g., document structure enforced by XML schemas).
It helps bring new writers up to speed if you can point them at some guidelines, rather than, say, let them write some stuff and tell them that’s that not really how we do that here. This is where it become evident that even w/o a team style guide, the team does have conventions, or at least parameters for what they’ll produce.
Just some thots. I agree that guidelines are, as someone says, guides. But it can be helpful to start somewhere.
Mike, good points. Thanks for participating in this discussion. I perform some editor-like roles as part of my job, and I have to say that rarely do people get what an editor’s true role is. An editor’s role isn’t to make sure that people are hyphenating e-mail or always including “message” after the word “e-mail.” Grammar and style are some of the least important aspects of communication (though of course I edit for this too). An editor’s real role is to ensure rightness, accuracy, and relevance of content. When I review communications, I tend to ask questions such as, Does this make sense? Who will be reading this? What kinds of questions will they have? Are these steps accurate? (I usually walk through them myself.) What’s the larger message we’re trying to send here? Is this logical?
These questions about content are more for communications rather than technical documentation, but my experience with editors is that they focus too much on grammar and style and in so doing miss the larger point of the communication. But yes, in so far as you’re documents will translated, some agreement about terms is definitely worthwhile.
Tom,
I follow your blog and find that there are times when I whole heartedly agree with you and times when I question everything you say.
Today’s post has me moving into the later category. I have worked in a number of industries and some tech writing teams I have worked with have been absolutely fine without having a style guide other than those you mention and the customers did not notice or care about minor formatting inconsistencies.
However, there are instances where a detailed and strictly followed style guide is needed. I currently work for a company whose customer is a state government and in this instance the customer cares very much if a document does not look exactly like the previous document.
When we started this project, we attempted to allow ourselves leeway in document structure and format to ensure that unforeseen document needs down the road could be addressed without a lot of headache. In every instance, when we have tried to update a format or style, level of heading or even the indent of figure labels, we have had to seek approval from the customer (usually requiring a committee meeting of some sort and a three to four week delay in getting an answer) and then often have had to revisit previously created and approved documents and adjust them to meet the new style change.
While I firmly agree that as writers, as workers, we need room to move and to exercise our creative minds when faced with a problem or challenge and having broad style guidelines allows this. However, in some situations and with some customers it is absolutely essential that a style guide is in place and is followed with a strict adherence or the project will never reach fruition.
Maybe the point I am trying to get to here is that, as with anything else, one must assess the situation and adapt to it as best possible and avoid broad generalizations or extrapolations. Each and every customer is different and unique and sometimes the customer welcomes the creative thought that comes with having broadly defined goal rather than strictly defined paths. Others… not so much.
PB, thanks for your well-written comment. I guess my situation is considerably different from yours. In my organization, each writer is segmented into different portfolios (mini-departments). Rarely do we collaborate on documents. Our customers don’t often overlap, so if there is inconsistency, it isn’t really noticeable. The situation you described seems very different, and I can see how more consistency might be necessary.
Also, thanks for pointing out your observation in the last paragraph — that sometimes strict adherence to a granular style guide is adapting to the situation.
Well, I also think that unified style is the right approach. It is not only about the exact style and good-look, but also transparency of the massage. Unified style makes understanding much more easy and in my opinion this is one of the things that makes good articles/tutorials/books etc. The style is something remarkable that also makes the whole easier to understand, more visible, more informative.
It’s interesting that transparency of content usually means absence of style. Though the way style is used by most groups, it means word usage and formatting rather than flair, flow, or sentence rhythm.
Having worked with a team of writers, all working on different projects, and no Managing editor in charge of consistency, I found that as long as I was consistent throughout a single document, everything was ok with our customers. But WE sure enjoyed have long and involved word geek arguments!
Richard, I know what you mean by the involved word geek arguments. I remember spending 45 minutes discussing whether a certain comma usage was allowed. Another time we spent days discussing whether Apple’s allowance of “then” as a coordinating conjunction (e.g., Click the File menu in the upper-right corner, then click Print) was grammatically correct. Still not sure about that one. Having helped put together a team style guide for 12 writers once, in my current job we decided to just adopt an existing one.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this thread. Sorry for my slow responses. I always read your comments shortly after you post them. This time it just took me a few days to get in the commenting mood.